May 13, 2007

I hate that expression, "zionazi." I'm guessing it derives from Muslims being disgruntled about the equally dodgy term, "islamo-fascist." But, for me zionism is bad enough without likening it to nazism or to anything else. In fact by invoking such expressions it's as if to say that zionism isn't bad enough unless we can liken zionists to nazis and it is plenty bad enough to condemn out of hand even though we can compare zionists to nazis in both ideological and behavioural terms.

So why the headline? Well, zionism has a long and ignominious history of collaboration with antisemitism. This collaboration is both ideological and practical. It reached its highest and most grotesque form with the rise of the nazis in Europe. This is documented by many sources. Lenni Brenner's work is possibly the best known but it has been touched on by Hannah Arendt and by Israel Shahak. It's a curious thing that in Mein Kampf Hitler claims that zionists are the worst of all Jews. That was before he was in power of course. Once he was in power he found the zionists the most amenable to his rule. In fairness to the zionists who collaborated from the outset they probably didn't predict the holocaust but once the holocaust was in progress the collaboration continued.

Israel Shahak reported a classic example of ideological collaboration in the form of Joachim Prinz's celebration of Hitler's triumph at the polls in 1933:

We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honors his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards the national will of other nations.

Well it seems the nazis too found something to celebrate in the rise of zionism and in the collaboration between these two racial supremacist movements and something to commemorate in their collaboration. Here's Lenni Brenner who:

related how Kurt Tuchler, a member of the German Zionist Federation Executive, "persuaded Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein of the SS to write a pro-Zionist piece for the Nazi press. The Baron agreed on the condition that he visited Palestine first, and two months after Hitler came to power the two men and their wives went to Palestine; von Mildenstein stayed there for six months before he returned....Von Mildenstein... wrote favorably about what he saw in the Zionist coloniesin Palestine; he also persuaded Goebbels to run the report as a massive twelve-part series in his own Der Angriff (The Assault), the leading Nazi propaganda organ (9/26-10/9/34).... To commemorate the Baron's expedition, Goebbels had a medal struck: on one side the swastika, on the other the Zionist star."

Well here's a picture of that medal:

So why the headline? It just happened to be the name of the file I was sent. Oi! the banality! Anyway, apparently, queries about the medal should go to John Sigler via www.onestate.org.